"At another department, the staff shopped at hardware chain Clas Ohlsson to buy bells for their patients ... The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) found that hospital overcrowding is common at all nine of western Sweden's hospitals with emergency departments."

In addition to all the other (literal) bells and whistles, there's an acute shortage of hospital beds; this increases risks to patients' safety, let alone health. And it's not a new problem, either:

"We have for years nagged about the problem of overcrowding, but nothing happens," a caregiver reports.

On the other hand, the Swedes have been successful in reining in health care costs, right?

It's easy to cut costs by supplying inferior health care, of course, but short cuts work only in the short run. Eventually, patients suffer, and they bring in the lawyers, costing the system tens of millions of dollars, and exacerbating the already critical problems facing the "Swedish Patient Insurance Scheme" [ed: really? They freely admit it's a "scheme?" Yup]. And just what kinds of problems are those?

Well:

"Mixed up test results, injuries suffered during childbirth, infections following surgery, and incorrect drug dosages are just a few of the medical errors that reveal it can be harmful to a patient’s health to end up at a Swedish hospital."

The new system puts online a lot more information, which is supposed to be "anonymized." The problem is, there's so much info that, according to Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, "participants in research can be "trivially" re-identified."

Add to that the fact that they've not been asked to consent to this new intrusion on their privacy, and one wonders why we're so bent on adopting our own version of national health care.

"At another department, the staff shopped at hardware chain Clas Ohlsson to buy bells for their patients ... The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) found that hospital overcrowding is common at all nine of western Sweden's hospitals with emergency departments."

In addition to all the other (literal) bells and whistles, there's an acute shortage of hospital beds; this increases risks to patients' safety, let alone health. And it's not a new problem, either:

"We have for years nagged about the problem of overcrowding, but nothing happens," a caregiver reports.

On the other hand, the Swedes have been successful in reining in health care costs, right?

It's easy to cut costs by supplying inferior health care, of course, but short cuts work only in the short run. Eventually, patients suffer, and they bring in the lawyers, costing the system tens of millions of dollars, and exacerbating the already critical problems facing the "Swedish Patient Insurance Scheme" [ed: really? They freely admit it's a "scheme?" Yup]. And just what kinds of problems are those?

Well:

"Mixed up test results, injuries suffered during childbirth, infections following surgery, and incorrect drug dosages are just a few of the medical errors that reveal it can be harmful to a patient’s health to end up at a Swedish hospital."

The new system puts online a lot more information, which is supposed to be "anonymized." The problem is, there's so much info that, according to Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, "participants in research can be "trivially" re-identified."

Add to that the fact that they've not been asked to consent to this new intrusion on their privacy, and one wonders why we're so bent on adopting our own version of national health care.